The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

to those needs with something relevant, whether it’s a Web page, a product description,
an order form or perhaps even a link to a support rep (SEE CONVOQ, PAGE 34). When you
type in “FedEx,” are you looking to send a package, buy an undervalued stock, apply for
a job – or check your own FedEx bill to see if you qualify for a rebate?
Search will become more of a background function – the presentation of relevant information
or functionality just-in-time rather than on-demand (SEE NETMESH AND ITS SITU-
ATION-AWARE SOFTWARE, PAGE 35). To do that, it will need a much better understanding
both of the user (as a type and as an individual in a particular context) and of the user’s
world, including the user’s friends and contacts as well as her business and activities and
the applications she uses. (We focus more on personalization in this panel, leaving the
community angle to the afternoon’s roundtable on user- and community-generated
metadata. See page 81.)
Like search itself, our panel is multi-faceted. Marissa Mayer of Google, Udi Manber of
A9.com and Arkady Volozh of Yandex represent full-line search companies, each with its
own twist as a business. Google so far is mostly content-free, enabling users to find others’
content and generating revenues primarily from advertising. A9 is a very broadly
defined search service that works closely with its parent Amazon.com; it is trying to add
new richness to search by adding into the mix the physical world on the one hand and
the user’s own content on the other. And finally, Yandex is a “traditional” portal based
around Russia’s leading search engine; it generates revenue from e-commerce and a
variety of services in addition to advertising. Steve Johnson’s company ChoiceStream
operates as – or would like to become – an OEM supplier of domain-specific personalization
services to all of them, whereas Alain Rappaport’s Medstory represents the ultimate
in domain-specific search with its ability to extract much of the meaning from
content in its chosen domain of medicine.
Steve Johnson, ChoiceStream: Have it your way
If Steve Johnson is truly successful with ChoiceStream, he may harm his customers’
businesses. Yet those customers – AOL, Columbia House, eMusic and, most recently
announced, Yahoo! – are eagerly signing up for his software, which personalizes the
choices and search results that each registered user sees when she visits a website. If it
worked perfectly, in theory, and if each vendor had a broad enough inventory, the
user would get the same results based on her own profile, whether she was visiting
AOL or eMusic or any other ChoiceStream customer. “The idea is that you can carry
not just your credit card but your personality and preferences with you everywhere.
But that’s a long way off. For now, our customers look at this as differentiation,” says
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